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Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 With Great Accuracy - Slashdot

 2 years ago
source link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/06/02/2043259/dogs-can-detect-covid-19-with-great-accuracy
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Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 With Great Accuracy

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According to a new study, dogs were able to better detect COVID-19 than PCR antigenic tests in both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Slashdot Falconhell shares the report via The Guardian: In the study, trained dogs were able to detect Covid in 97% of symptomatic cases and nearly 100% of asymptomatic cases. The study featured 335 participants from Covid screening centers in Paris. Of the participants, 109 were positive with Covid, including 31 who were asymptomatic. The detection dogs, provided by French fire stations and the United Arab Emirates, received three to six weeks of training, depending on if a dog was previously trained for odor detection. The dogs sniffed samples of human sweat placed in an olfaction cone. If a dog detected Covid, it sat down in front of the cone.

Ultimately, the trained dogs were more sensitive to positive cases. Nasal PCR tests were better able to better detect negative cases. In two false positive cases, dogs falsely identified other coronavirus respiratory illness strains that were not Covid. While there have been previous studies on the capability of dogs to detect Covid, this is believed to be the first to compare the accuracy of dogs to antigenic tests.
The study has been published in the journal Plos One.
  • COVID prevention dog!
        • Re:

          A single relatively preventable disease accounted for 10% of all deaths in a year, and you're trying to make it sound like it's not a big deal. Are you a psychopath? You sound like a psychopath.

          • When i first read it I figured he was joking about the 2019 moniker. Covid-19, discovered in 2019 is significantly different than the covid going around now. Covid-21 might be more accurate. By significant I mean in terms of tricking the immune system. Technically all coronavirus share 75% of the same genetic profile in their spike proteins and 95% in the envelop protein. So if 2019 variant was enough to earn a unique name, then why arent the omicron offspring given a different mainstream moniker for their
            • Out of the top of my head:
              - the current spike found in BA.1/.2/.4/.5 etc. is still closely related enough to the one from Wuhan that your antibodies - as long as you have enough of them (e.g. you had a recent enough booster, because the level decrease over time) - are good enough to detect and tag it.
              - the mutations are just a few dozens at best spread along the genome: e.g. We still run the alignment step using the wuhan sequence as a reference and it works perfectly.
              - the clinical

        • Re:

          Data is useless without context. Here the thing: Without lockdowns Covid deaths would have been of a magnitude higher than any of the other two in that list. Think about this for a moment, Covid made number 3 on the list despite preventative measures.
            • There are some of those countries that didn't need to explicitely enforce official lockdown.
              Some countries had to merely recommend increasing work from home, and the employer quickly reacted and took matter in their own hands.
              - Sweden is an example of a country that never explicitely passed lockdown regulation, but nonetheless the amount of person-to-person interaction was low enough to not see surge of deaths (damn, I can't find the actual reference now... happened to discuss during a conference wi

          • Any proof of that ? As far as I know, Sweden had less death than France and France was one of the most strict country about covid. An analyst, Dr. Martin Blachier, explained that worst predictions were based on the fact that sick people would carry on their life, going to party with fever, instead of staying home. Most of the data we had to justify lockdown were bullshit at best.
            My country data showed, after all, that 2% of the people going to hospital were linked to covid. They also admitted that people go

            • Re:

              Testing positive for Covid would naturally make someone a Covid patient. Holy fucking duh?

            • Re:

              You need proof that socialising with other people that have a contagion would result in more cases?
  • just wait the for NEW DRUG DOG for COVID missed used by the GOVERNMENT

    • Re:

      Misused, NOT "missed used"

  • Its going to be like the Terminator movie... a pair of German Shepherds giving everyone a sniff at the entrance to the building.
    • Re:

      More like the Cozumel Fruit Dogs.

  • Perhaps the word 'and' was missing from that summary. The article doesn't have a "PCR antigenic test", it has 3 different tests, one has "PCR" in it, and another has "antigen" in it.
  • A dogs time in the bathroom is limited to a quick drink,
    and dogs are always happy when your friends come over.

  • WHO told us a few years ago that dogs are not a covid risk and now we find out that they are actually useful in this area.

    in other words, WHO let the dogs out. again.

    • Re:

      Who? Who?
  • Curious what exactly they're smelling...? Probably not the virus itself..but if infected, I guess there's some hormone or other substance released in our sweat that is the tell? (Which is why they also had false-positives with other corona viruses.)

    And we have 'smelling' devices, can we isolate whatever it is the dogs are smelling, and come up with something that can smell/detect whatever 'that' is?

    • Re:

      Oh, they knew all right. A simple urine strip test will also spot it. Loss of Potassium basically. Eating bananas, Mangos and Apricots may mask their detection rates (as well as renal failure/issues), In Australia Covid test strips are 5 for $50 retail . I would like to see dogs at the airport. I eagerly the blind ivermectin studies with adjuncts(not just ivm) results.
    • Re:

      Hypothetically a neural net trained algorithm could be able to do that if paired with some 'smelling device' that is good enough.
      Though I'm not sure how you'd build a general purpose smelling device. It's not too difficult to design a special purpose smelling device, which detects the presence of specific chemical compounds with a chemical sensor that is designed to detect that compound. But before you can design such a sensor, you need to know what compound you're looking for.

      Thus since dogs already hav
    • Re:

      Erm... that is pretty much how we diagnose most pathogen via tests. Not by detecting the pathogen, but by the effects, chemicals and antibodies that occur as a result.

      The major issue with dogs is the amount of time it takes to train them to sniff out different things. For a drug sniffer dog, it takes 6-8 months to make them reliable enough for use, then they'll be sniffing out the same thing for life. With viruses, they can change so fast that by the time a dog is trained on one illness it may have mutat

      • Re:

        With viruses, they can change so fast that by the time a dog is trained on one illness it may have mutated or disappeared entirely.

        According to the study, it takes 3 to 6 weeks to train the dogs, not months or years. This is not beyond a reasonable doubt training, just good enough to be as good or better than the invasive tests (and happens to be faster, too).

    • Re:

      Curious what exactly they're smelling...?

      It's right there in the study: VOCs that the infected cells give off.

  • Here's how you do it:

    1. cough in the critter's face
    2. wait about a week
    3. if the critter gets covid, so did you: profit!

    • Re:

      Yes, dogs can actually catch Covid19. I wonder if their sense of smell is affected while they fight against the disease? Can they still work as a testing dog if they are positive?

  • Finland was using dogs to sniff out COVID back in 2020. They were dependable then. How did this take so long here?

    • Re:

      No kidding, and were more accurate than the other tests

    • Re:

      Because nobody gets rich by doing it.

    • Re:

      Doesn't scale well.

      • Re:

        Of course they scale well. Just train larger dogs, like Great Danes, silly.

        Or alternatively, train a pack of chihuahuas, so you can do more testing in parallel for the same amount of dog food.

    • Re:

      Because it is useless since day one. Covid is widespread, looking for it doesn't make any sense.
      • Re:

        It really wasn't that widespread in 2020 though. Remember, that was pre-omicron and even pre-delta, both of which were significant game changers in the evolution of the pandemic.
  • Anyone heard of a seeing-eye cat, a bomb-sniffing cat, guard cat, drug-sniffing cat, or a search-and-rescue cat?

    Meanwhile cats are considered an invasive species everywhere, kill off billions of birds and other small animals every year (including causing many species to go extinct), and will transmit toxoplasmosis which is bad for pregnant women.

    • Re:

      But... So cute!

    • Re:

      Also, cats have been caught smuggling drugs into prisons worldwide.
    • Re:

      i heard cats also pushed an old lady over in the street, oh the horror!

    • Re:

      No, but cats tend to handle mice and rats, which spread diseases and create issues with food storage and distribution when left unchecked.

      The need for bomb sniffing is occasional, and I'm glad that there are dogs trained to do it...but pest control is needed every hour of every day, everywhere...and cats do it better.

  • Other dogs can find viruses too small for the eye but my mutt never can find her tennis-ball.

  • See Spot sniff covid. See Spot get covid. Cough Spot cough! Can it happen?
  • Are these the same highly-trained dogs that magically find drugs when their handler wants them to? https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20... [npr.org]
  • The study used olfaction cones prepared with sweat or saliva samples, which sounds like it would result in some relatively concentrated odors. The sweat samples were collected where "the participants to place two sterile surgical compresses under their armpits for 2 min".

    The results are interesting, but "Further studies will be focused on direct sniffing by dogs to evaluate sniffer dogs for mass pre-test in airports, harbors, railways stations, cultural activities or sporting events".


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